Hugh: Have you read the Stephen LaBerge conversation in Blackmore’s Conversations on Consciousness?
Susan: I have. He seems to be saying that lucid living appears to entail understanding the illusion of the self and its separateness. I like his idea that blending the Eastern spiritual and Western scientific perspectives will bring about a new understanding of consciousness. I haven't ever had lucid dreaming so I don't know how that would affect me, but I do know that dreams are an important part of experience and our consciousness has some control over our remembrance of dreams.
Hugh: What struck me about LaBerge is his idea that consciousness is a kind of dreaming from which we can wake up, e.g. Buddha. He suggests that we might achieve a lucid consciousness where we recognize that our attachment to things, including the self, is but a story. If this insight were achieved, how would it change our lives? Susan Blackmore has much to say about this question. My problem with consciousness being a story the brain tells itself is that my immediate perception of my experience as I type these letters and words, think these thoughts, feel the coolness of the keys, the collar too tight about my neck, the sharp ache in my heart for a loved one, this immediate sense of my own life shouts out "No, it ain't so." How do you reconcile what appear to be our abstract considerations about consciousness and your immediate perception of your own life?
Susan: I think there is merit in learning how to give up our attachment to things. If nothing else, it may help one to be relieved of miseries and heart aches, but there is something cold and not human about the attitude that this is all a "story." Perhaps I haven't looked deeply enough at Buddhist teachings to be saying this, but my take is that "being mindful" and aware of those miseries and heart aches is what helps us heal and that we must go through some necessary losses that are real in our lives. It ain't so. So, I agree with your "No, it ain't so" response to all of this. When I started reading Susan Blackmore's comments in response to the question "Who is asking the question?" and she reached some point in her meditation where she rejected her own body as part of her self because she couldn't see her own face, I reached my limit. I thought she was ridiculous and I was gratified to see that her own Zen teacher corrected her when he asked if she was in the room and she said "no". He said "yes, you are here." Of course she was in the room and of course she is asking the question. How else would she be getting royalties from her book about asking those questions?
Hugh: I do keep thinking, however, that if one could "wake up" from our normal waking experience, there would be an expansion in one's experience of existence, not as "my existence" but of existence itself. Something like the experience of love. LaBerge points to the illusion of consciousness as a false experience of isolation -- the true experience is identity with others and with the universe -- for LaBerge, consciousness itself is not an illusion. That speaks very much to my own intuitions and it's probably time I own up to my own mystical inclinations. How about your mystical inclinations?
Susan: I have my own mystical inclinations as well, and am hoping that with my retirement, I will have time to meditate and test out this hypothesis. Can we point to experiences that give us "identity with others and with the universe" without that waking up event? Have you had a sense of "hyper reality" that he implies?
Hugh: Not really. Just intuitions, though I wonder about that "just." Do you believe you have free will?
Susan: Yes. Insofar as we make choices (of mates, of schools, of jobs we take, of presidents we vote for, etc.) I believe in free will and I believe that my brain, even if it is "just" neurons firing, helps me exercise that free will with my "executive function" in my frontal lobes. The problem with addiction, as I gather from listening to the presentation today, is a difficult diminution of the will. In your case of smoking, you may have had trouble with will power, but you were always free on some abstract level to quit.
Hugh: Do you believe there is something in addition to brain function that makes free will possible? It sounds as if you are speaking of free will as an expression of some other reality than the biochemistry of the brain.
Susan: No, it's just an abstract illusion I like to believe in.
Hugh: I love that response. Picture me laughing even as I am writing to you now. Well, let's move on to the final question: How has our study of consciousness affected you?
Susan: In so many ways! I now walk around trying to be conscious of my consciousness. All the kinds of thoughts Susan Blackmore talks about have occurred to me (conversations with people, plans for tomorrow, awareness of pain, etc.) as well as moments of quiet (no thoughts, but not exactly "abiding tranquility" either). The idea of abiding tranquility appeals to me a great deal because I think it is one of the ways one might feel more in tune with or in unity with the universe. I am beginning to think of consciousness as a multi-layered entity because there can be different levels of electrical activity (alpha brain waves as well as other types of waves), different levels of metabolic activity (the unconscious person being at the lowest level) and different thought patterns (thoughts versus no thoughts). Because this is a hard problem to study, I will continue to read about consciousness with a new perspective on brain functioning, one which I owe mostly to you and your persistent questioning. I myself have another question: Is it not possible that Susan Blackmore's idea about how all of consciousness is an illusion an illusion as well?
Hugh: I admire Susan Blackmore. because she seems to me to be honest broker in the debate over consciousness. She has her own conclusions, of course, but she is exceptionally able to entertain opposing ideas. I think this mutes any charge that she may be succumbing to her own illusion. I feel as you do about our journey with our students through the mind and brain. It has left me literally wandering aimlessly about. When I think consciousness is an illusion, I seem to be trying to make myself disappear; when I think consciousness is a fundamental aspect of universe, I feel myself to be the grass waving in the wind. My final thought is that the only meaning is existence itself, illusion or no illusion.
Susan: I agree that "the only meaning is existence" and no matter how hard I try to think of all this as an illusion, my root canal reminds me otherwise.